92 answerable to, and enlivened by, their biology: clumps and masses of unruly verdure; slender screens of pine or pop- lar; an arrangement of breasts and thighs. To accomplish this balance between the statuesque and the mobile, and to make the equilibrium seem natural, however, took a serious psychological toll on the painter. So that even though there are no sliced ears or flights to the South Seas in his curriculum vi- tae, Cézanne was nonetheless possessed by a merciless creative fury-one that was all the more punishing, perhaps, for being directed inward, toward his endlessly complex composi- tionaJ intelligence. Had he ac- tually been what the proto- Cubist orthodoxy wants him to be-that is, an artist for whom subject matter was a pretext for the ma- nipulation of fonn-Cézanne's composi- tional agonies might have been less pro- tracted. But it was precisely because this was not ttue--because he was anything but indifferent to the objective properties of the subject, and sought to liberate, rather than suppress, them by distortions of per- spective and startling tonal inventions- that he achieved an illumination both of this world and immeasurably beyond it. ^STONISHINGLY, the Philadelphia show .r-\. is the first in sixty years to offer a survey of Cézanne's entire career, from the aggressive early works of the eigh- teen -sixties to the luminous oils and wa- tercolors of his last year, 1906. The ex- hibition positively invites the visitor to disobey the usual one-way traffic regu- lations of museumgoing and move back and forth between decades and rooms, as motifs appear, disappear, and reap- pear in different moods and manners. The late watercolor of a single skull- seen dead on, sardonically reposing on a bright-colored drapery, the cranium poignantly identical to Cézanne's own bald dome-is the valedictory bookend to one of his earliest paintings of a skull, in which the impasto is trowelled on with a palette knife in the turbid, ballsy manner (literally the style couillard) of the eighteen-sixties. As the son of a well-to-do Aix banker, the young Cézanne wanted to prove him- self Provençal rather than provincial, and throughout his life he referred to his early, southern fr1ends as mes compatri- otes. It was Provence that provided the sensual, morbid, and darkly religious themes of temptation and suffering that took on a sado-erotic tinge in Cézanne's early work. Palnfully shy and repressed, he covered his awkwardness with man- gled quotations from Old Masters, and his canvases with scenes of rapes, mur- ders, and debauches. The re- markable "Feast," with 1ts post- coital bodies wound like strings of boudin blanc sausages about a long, upturned table, appar- ently floating in a cerulean void, evidently came to Cézanne from Veronese's 'Wedding at Cana." Similarly, the shrieking, pallid victim and her knife- wielding assailants in "The Murder" are earth-weighted bodies from the repertoire of Daumier and Courbet, though the hideous night- mares are all Cézanne's own. Cézanne, who never thought of him- self as a revolutionary, aspired from the outset to find a modern visual language that, paradoxically, would be strong enough to claim its place in the pan- theon of past masters. And for that very reason he tormented himself with a sense of the impossibility of the enter- prise and the inadequacy of his paltry gifts. (When his childhood friend Emile Zola tactlessly presented him, in 1886, with the novel "L'Oeuvre," in which he was portrayed precisely in this light, it was the abrupt end of their long and warm relationship.) Cézanne's early in- securities made him especially ambiva- lent about contemporary innovators who seemed to possess the confident vision he wanted. One of his responses to Ma- net's supercool "Olympia," in 1875, for example, was a facetious parody, in the lightning-sketch manner of Fragonard, with himself posed as the Artist, dark and beetling, before a powder-puff model curled in fetal self-defense. "The Eternal Feminine" took this attack on art's fe- tishes even further, by exhibiting a sum- marized nude, her genitals displaced from the actual groin (which is incoher- ently sketched) to the vaginal canopy over her bed; her eyes are reduced to bloody daubs. The miscellaneous idola- ters gathered at her divan range from a Provença1 troubadour and a bishop to a dark-suited bourgeois holding a sign THE NEW YORKER., JUNE 17; 1996 that reads "B-A-N," which we are evi- dently meant to complete as "banque" and thus recognize as emblematic of Cé- zanne's father. And, just as the right side of the painting is dominated by two men wrestling, the divided self of the artist appears in two separate personifications: the painter whose description of the scene is nothing other than the vaginal canopy and, in the lower foreground, the bald head of the voyeur, scrutinizing the entire, unholy messe. With these misgivings about paint- erly fashion preying on him, it's not sur- prising that Cézanne found it hard to settle down in Paris, even after he be- gan living with the model Hortense Fiquet, by whom he had a son in 1872. Throughout the seventies, he kept go- ing back to Aix, always concealing his ménage from his forbidding father, even for a time taking a job in the family bank, lest he be cut off w1thout a sou. If Zola played the role of sympathetic brother, shelling out loan after loan with no illusion of repayment, it's not too much of a platitude to see the protective figure of Camille Pissarro as the surro- gate bon papa. And it's equally tempting to assume a period of Impressionist therapy for Cezanne, as he was coaxed into relaxation by the mentorship of Pissarro at Auvers. But in fact the result of Pis sarro's genuine benevolence was to encourage Cezanne to pursue his own flinty path. Impressionism's essential project-the capture of momentary effects of light-was too insubstantial to fully engage him. Cézanne's sights were set instead on what he described as "a taste of the eternity of nature." So al- though conventionaJ wisdom insists that Cézanne underwent an Impressionist "transition" en route to his mature land- scapes and still-lifes, the most powerful paintings belonging to the late seventies are fundamentally anti-Impressionist in concept and execution. The "Rocks at L'Estaque," for exam- ple, contradicts all the Impressionists' rules of thumb. The viewpoint is dra- matically low, claustrophobically resist- ing any possibility of panorama. Within the shallow picture space the ancient rocks rise like granite knuckles, clenched and grim, toward the bay. The seawater that in a Monet would sparkle with multicolored reflections seems confined and dammed up in Cezanne's work, and